Had a wonderful experience on Tuesday teaching eight students on the island I built and manage, AFTRS Esperance (slurl). They were here to learn how to approach professionally designing sound for games and worlds like this ours. From my perspective they appeared early in the day and I took trained them for five hours in the basics of communication, moving around our world, building, general management of one’s assets but most time was spent on intermediate sound design. I was stunned how quickly new students nowadays pick things up so quickly as I took them further through the scripting for our amazing world. From relative babies of this world after five hours they were flying, dancing and more importantly building and adding scripts to sound objects all over the place. A mixture of ambient sound, transient effects and interactive sound. There were even two screen composer students who were adding evolving music around the spaceship and ghost castle sets I mentioned in my previous post.

To put the icing on the cake we were joined at the end by Robbie Dingo for an hour master-class. Robbie, who develops the best musical instruments in our world (click here to go to his store) and a sound guru, had set up a great interactive walk-through on one of the backlots and we were treated to listening to him speak (and my students spoke back), yes really weird, hearing avies in this world speak – where does their voice come from? Robbie did a post on his in-world blog called ‘Virtual Lecture’ that may explain it. Anyway Robbie took us all through the basics of scripting sound showing large boards with key examples on. We then listened and interacted with each example as we walked around in our class-like huddle. At the end we saw some of Robbies wonderful musical instrument creations, synchronised marimbas and his incredible installation ‘The Whisper Box’. I have installed his Elven drums and other instruments around the island already and Robbie has kindly left the Whisper Box on the island for a while click here to go to precise spot.

All in all a great day and an example of how new people in this world can with the right guidance and mentorship really learn some great skills. From zero to a hundred in six hours.

Here are some images.

Robbie prepared a wonderful interactive teaching walkthrough

We all listened intently as Robbie took us through some more complex scripts.

I had already taught them the basics of looped, ambient and some trigger sound and this is one of the sets we sound designed.

Robbie explains the wonders of the CollisionSound script, we all seem to crash into things regularly in this world.

and here we are about to test that out by each of us walking through the trip wire.

Beware the objects that listen and sensor us. We walk into the sensor circle which triggers a sound. Normally one wouldn’t see the dome of course.